Andrew Vachss quotes - page 2

The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape. (Andrew Vachss)
Fighting means you could lose. Bullying means you can't. A bully wants to beat somebody; he doesn't want to fight somebody.
Andrew Vachss
All children are born pure egoists. They perceive their needs to the exclusion of all others. Only through socialization do they learn that some forms of gratification must be deferred and others denied.
Andrew Vachss
We don't protect our young, and we tolerate predators of our own species.
Andrew Vachss
In some neighborhoods, if you want to walk down the streets, you've got two choices - look down, or look hard.
Andrew Vachss
I promise you, there are people in America whose only problem with the Taliban is that they did it for the wrong god. Whether it's incest, rape, terrorism or Nazism, it's all the same thing-accumulating and abusing power.
Andrew Vachss
I think that what drives the American public, which is like a huge, lumbering beast, is anger; and the other thing that drives it is self–interest. What I'm trying to do in my books is different from other people writing about child abuse. I'm not trying to engender sympathy so much as to say to the public, 'Today's victim is tomorrow's predator.' The things that you fear have a genesis, and the price of being safe in this world is early intervention. It costs you something to look away, not just in moral terms, but in practical terms.
Andrew Vachss
My position on pornography is quite simple. You can argue about Penthouse or Playboy or things of that ilk. But child pornography, a picture of a child engaged in a sexual act, is a photograph of a crime and you cannot argue about that. It is, per se, illegal, illicit and immoral. It is unfortunate that my work is taken up by people with whom I am not allied.
Andrew Vachss
If you look at Burke closely, you'll see the prototypical abused child: hypervigilant, distrustful. He's so committed to his family of choice-not his DNA-biological family, which tortured him, or the state which raised him, but the family that he chose-that homicide is a natural consequence of injuring any of that family. He's not a hit man. But he shares the same religion I do, which is revenge.
Andrew Vachss
I don't believe this country will ever come to grips with child abuse until they make the obvious, simple connection between today's victim and tomorrow's predator. As long as they believe a Ted Bundy or a John Wayne Gacy is a biogenetic mistake as opposed to a beast that was built and a monster that was made, they'll continue to blithely walk around, saying, 'I'm against child abuse.
Andrew Vachss
[C]an you be noble as you practice violence, extortion, blackmail, even mass murder? The struggle to be free from oppression is, in my mind, per se noble. But noble causes attract a wide range of participants, and many would fall far short of nobility. (Andrew Vachss)
It's an extremely profitable thing to be 'concerned' about drugs. You don't just have treatment programs, you have law enforcement programs, you have entire industries that could not function but for drugs. Including the prison industry. I think America has gone psychotic ... there are human beings-even as we speak-dying, in the kind of shrieking, tormenting pain you couldn't inflict on a P. O. W., because America doesn't want them to be drug addicts.
Andrew Vachss
[A]nybody who has served in combat in any way understands that words are weapons. And I'm in a war. The war hasn't stopped. I've always used the books as a blunt instrument.
Andrew Vachss
I don't love kids. I hate their predators. It's a burning hatred I feel to this day.
Andrew Vachss
Plenty of states, like Florida, still don't have [law guardians]. What does that tell you? Because with non-attorney guardians there's no attorney-client privilege. There's no ability to cross–examine witnesses, to subpoena evidence, to appeal. Basically you serve completely at the pleasure of the judge. And if you don't please the judge, you're history. What more of a message do kids need?
Andrew Vachss
Journalism is what maintains democracy. It's the force for progressive social change.
Andrew Vachss
Journalism is the protection between people and any sort of totalitarian rule. That's why my hero, admittedly a flawed one, is a journalist.
Andrew Vachss
I'm in pursuit of what cannot be achieved: perfection.
Andrew Vachss
The idea that you're not a writer until you're published is a lie.
Andrew Vachss
I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.
Andrew Vachss